Report cites `epidemic' of deadly lung cancer among women

An epidemic of lung cancer among American women has been quietly growing for decades, and an end to the surge appears nowhere in sight, doctors will report Wednesday.

For women, deaths due to lung cancer now outstrip those caused by breast cancer and all gynecologic cancers combined, the researchers said. The team of medical scientists who assessed the scope of lung cancer in women say mortality has climbed among women even as smoking and deaths from the disease have declined in men.

Deaths caused by smoking rose 600 percent in U.S. women between 1930 to 1997, and continues to rise, the team of scientists said Tuesday.

"This is a true epidemic," said Dr. Jyoti Patel, an instructor in hematology and oncology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. "The numbers are far beyond what we would have imagined 30 years ago. In fact, the numbers are in excess of what we would have predicted, and they continue to increase.

"People need to realize that lung cancer is a women's disease," said Patel, lead author of the study appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"When you talk to most women, they don't seem to realize that they have a real susceptibility to lung cancer."

The American Cancer Society estimates 68,510 women will die of lung cancer this year, compared with 40,110 who will die of breast cancer. A further 16,090 will die of ovarian cancer and 7,090 of uterine cancer.

Dr. Mark Kris, chief of thoracic oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, said that not only have smoking-incidence and lung-cancer deaths risen in women for seven decades, they have continued to do so.

"The core message of the paper is the number of young women who start smoking and how that number has grown astronomically, especially in the last decade or so.

"The face of lung cancer has changed," Kris added. "It used to occur mostly among people who were current smokers. The average person now getting cancer stopped smoking decades ago." Risks for the disease never declines to zero, Kris said. Genetic damage remains in the lungs for decades.

Kris and his colleagues also found a biologic disparity between the sexes when comparing smokers and their cancers. Women smokers are more likely to have estrogen receptors driving the growth of lung cancer.

Citing earlier work, Kris said, studies have suggested that women generally smoke fewer cigarettes, but this does not equate with a lower cancer risk.

Despite the devastating mortality rate, women fare better than men when treated for the disease, especially with the new so-called targeted therapies.